[colgur]

"[...] students need to be able to do the hard jobs".

Difficulty comes in all shapes and sizes. Your next point is better: "[...] teach concepts instead of tools and languages".

That approach to education sees any language and/or run-time environment as an opportunity to work with an underlying concept.

A study of any language or run-time to the exclusion of an underlying concept is short-sighted. Any student with a language-centric approach to learning faces many difficulties in their professional life. We must all be able to adapt to changes in our field. We must be able to separate fad from fundamentally different.